Snowboarder Danny Davis’s Ambivalent Comeback

COPPER MOUNTAIN, Colo. — Danny Davis has been through it all before, and before that, too. As the top American snowboarders converge on the Mammoth Mountain ski area in California this week to decide who will compete next month in Sochi, Russia, the Winter Olympics are within Davis’s reach for the third time.

Eight years ago, when he was 17, Davis was perfectly positioned for a spot on the halfpipe team, ranked third before he struggled in the final two qualifying events and dropped out of the Olympic lineup.

Four years ago, he won an event at Mammoth in early January, one week after witnessing his good friend Kevin Pearce nearly die from a fall in the halfpipe. Determined to get to the Olympics for Pearce, who was in a coma but survived with a traumatic brain injury, his competitive career over, Davis soon won another event in Utah.

Virtually assured of an Olympic spot, he drunkenly crashed a four-wheel all-terrain vehicle into a fence. A friend riding with Davis broke his femur. Davis broke his back and woke up in a hospital, another Olympic chance shattered.

“I was just feeling really stupid,” Davis said in an interview last month. “Really stupid. Mostly because of, obviously, drinking and making a stupid mistake. And, two, that Kev got hurt snowboarding, and I got hurt being stupid. That was the biggest feel to it all. No Olympics? That bummed a lot of people out who support me — my family and all that stuff. But mostly because everything was for Kevin at that time, and he wanted the Olympics more than anybody.

“I deserved what I got. Kevin did not deserve what he got. That was the biggest, hardest part of it — feeling really stupid.”

Davis has three Olympic qualifying events this weekend at Mammoth to determine if he makes the Olympics this time. Four men are likely to make the halfpipe team, including Shaun White and Greg Bretz. Davis is in sixth place after the season’s first two qualifying events.

There may be no competitor more popular than Davis. A snowboarder’s snowboarder, with his dark hair and scraggly beard, he plays the throwback hippie, in both looks and spirit, in a sport that delicately balances its backwoods roots with its growing corporate reliance. (Davis, despite his counterculture vibe, has longtime sponsorships with Mountain Dew and Burton snowboards, among others.)

For the past couple of years, Davis and his sponsors have built a modified, Seussian halfpipe, meant as snowboarding’s version of a skate park — the 22-foot walls cut with big gaps, playground rails built into the walls, a volcanolike mound in the middle. They called it the peace pipe.

At a recent qualifying event at Copper Mountain, the public-address system eschewed the usual hip-hop and top-40 soundtrack and played the Grateful Dead as Davis zigged down the halfpipe. At 25, Davis is one of the older competitors, but one deeply connected with the next generation, which sees him as a representation of snowboarding’s inclusive, mellow roots, not the intensely competitive, individual pursuit now associated with the likes of White, a two-time Olympic gold medalist.

Davis has, in snowboarding’s purest and most complimentary sense, style. In snowboarding, that means he performs with old-school grace and nuance, which many fear is disappearing in a “spin-to-win” culture of dizzying acrobatics. His signature moves are the floaty tricks, as the United States team’s coach, Mike Jankowski, called his time-stopping maneuvers that sometimes have no spin at all, turning Davis into a human knuckleball.

Yet Davis can also do the latest tricks, like the double cork, a flipping and spinning move that is necessary to win contests like the ones this weekend.

“He’s got that unique style,” Jankowski said. “His double corks are true corks. He is the kaleidoscope. Louie Vito’s is more of a 180, double back flip, 180. Danny’s grabbing his tail and is truly rotating, both directions at the same time. He oozes with style.”

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Davis, with his dark hair and scraggly beard, plays the throwback hippie in a sport that balances its backwoods roots with its growing corporate reliance.CreditDoug Pensinger/Getty Images

It all infuses Davis with ambivalence toward the Olympics. He is not convinced that something as unstructured as snowboarding belongs there.

“I would love to win the X Games more than have a gold medal, for sure,” Davis said, because the X Games, despite their corporate heart as an ESPN made-for-television event, have deep credibility in the world of snowboarding. It explains, in part, why the Olympics keep adding established X Games events.

But as long as the Olympics invite snowboarders, Davis reasoned, he may as well try to go.

“It’s not so much about who did the best run,” Davis said of the Olympics. “It’s about who did the most flips and the most spins. I hate that about it. I don’t agree with it. But I do think that when I’m older, and if I passed up the opportunity to go to the Olympics, I’d be like: ‘That was stupid. You should have given it a good try.’ I’m going to give it my best try.”

One other reason: the audience.

“The viewership’s probably insane,” Davis said. “The number of kids who see it and think, ‘That was so cool, I want to be a snowboarder’ — you’re probably getting a lot of people into the sport. Which is awesome.”

Davis was raised in Highland, Mich., an hour northwest of Detroit. His parents, Laura and Mike — he is an engineer for a company that makes air bags and seatbelts for the car industry — gave Danny his first snowboard at age 8. Davis and his older brother, Mickey, were soon sliding down the 300 vertical feet of Michigan’s Alpine Valley ski area.

By 13, Davis was competing in a national event at Mammoth. Sponsors began to line up. To help finance his burgeoning career, he crocheted hats that he sold for $10 at school and a local shop. At 15, he earned his first competitive paycheck, $800 at Breckenridge.

At 18, Davis bought a house in Truckee, Calif., near Lake Tahoe.

His family moved to Utah a few years ago to be closer to Davis’s snowboarding pursuits and to follow him from contest to contest. It is hard for Davis’s parents to envision any other calling for him.

“He loves this so much,” Laura Davis said. “And he is so passionate about snowboarding.”

Mike Davis said, “Not many kids get to live that kind of life.”

Danny Davis is also coming back from a broken leg he sustained in New Zealand in 2012. His femur snapped when he crashed at the side of a landing area on a slopestyle course and slid into a pole.

“That one I remember super-clearly,” Davis said. “Shaking my femur and it’s not connected. It was crazy.”

Doctors inserted a rod, which was later removed and replaced by a thicker rod meant to withstand the stress of Davis’s profession. Recovery wiped out last season.

Making the Olympics, then, would be a comeback story that dates back eight years. Mostly, it is tied to the foggy memory of four years ago, an A.T.V. wreck so soon after Pearce’s accident, so soon before the Olympics. As it happened, another close friend, Scotty Lago, earned a spot and won a bronze medal.

Now Davis is back in Mammoth, probably needing a win or two again to make the Olympic team that he thought he had made before.

A few weeks ago, Davis was interviewed by a television reporter who was surprised to discover his nonchalance toward the Olympics. It does not fit the usual narrative of devoting four years to a singular goal.

“Everyone puts Olympics on this big old pedestal,” Davis said, sipping on a beer on a sun-splashed day at Copper Mountain, cares nowhere in sight. “But snowboarding is the thing we all love.”